He returned to Danville to go to Centre College and then continued his education at St. Joseph Academy in Bardstown, Kentucky, where he also served as a Greek professor during his senior year.

Theodores father Kane O'Hara, was an Irish political exile[1] He later studied law with future United States Vice President and Confederate Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge, and he was admitted to the bar in 1842.

O'Hara left the Louisville Times in 1853 to join General John A. Quitman's filibuster expedition to Cuba.

[citation needed] At the beginning of the American Civil War in 1861, O'Hara joined the Confederate army and became lieutenant colonel of the Twelfth Alabama Regiment.

But conflicts with General Braxton Bragg and with President of the Confederate States of America Jefferson Davis hampered his military career and made his efforts to attain a regimental command futile.

His friend Sergeant Henry T. Stanton read "Bivouac of the Dead" at the reinterment and said, "O'Hara, in giving utterance to this song, became at once the builder of his own monument and the author of his own epitaph."

Lines from the poem would eventually grace the gates of numerous national cemeteries and several monuments of Confederate Dead.

In particular, the first verse's second quatrain is often quoted: On Fame's eternal camping-ground Their silent tents are spread, And Glory guards, with solemn round, The bivouac of the dead.